“Is a pig’s pussy pork?” he roared into their headsets. “Does the pope shit in the woods? You bet your butt we gotta do this. You just keep that camera on those cop cars and personnel carriers. You’re going to love me in the daylight.”
“Why will we love you, Elias?” Sandy asked, dumbfounded.
“’Cause I’m gonna make you both rich and famous. I’m gonna make you two … rock stars!!”
A state cop car, rack lights coruscating brilliantly, and an APC were still stuck in the intersection, their front bumpers touching. Now two long lines of vehicles stretching up and down Highway 9 were jammed end to end, frozen in place.
“Oh no,” Jules said.
A blazing .50 caliber incendiary round hit the state cop engine like a firebomb out of hell. The phosphorus and friction sparks combined to ignite first the gasoline vapor in the engine, then the fuel line, then the gas tank, resulting in a series of three explosions—whomp! whomp!! WHOMP!!! With the third blast, the cop car turned into one stupendous reddish-yellow fireball levitating fifteen feet in the air, lifting the vehicle right along with it, the entire conflagration billowing black noxious smoke. Moreover, the cars were jammed so tightly together that the inferno, which had been the first car, was blowing up other vehicles, turning each of them into a floating globe of flame, which, through sympathetic detonation, blew up the police car nearest it. One after another, the cop cars began exploding into fireballs, all the way down the line. Rack lights, bumpers, tires, side mirrors, steering wheels, Smokey Bear hats, Maglites, shotguns, pistols, handcuffs, engine hoods were flying in all directions at once.
Elias fired an incendiary round into the hood of an APC. Its engine vapor, gas lines, and fuel tanks were blowing so hard that the final WHUMP!!! and swelling fireball lifted the APC ten feet into the air, bursting its uniformed, helmeted, fully armed guardsmen straight through the sheet of flames that had been the canvas top once covering the carrier bed. That exploding APC ignited another, which ignited the one jammed up against its bumper, which set fire from the one next to it, straight down the road.
Highway 9 was now a seamless concatenation of blazing wrecks a quarter mile long.
“Hey ladies, check your six,” Elias shouted. “Look what’s coming now.”
Jules scanned the night sky with her binoculars. Over the small woods a mile or so behind them were six army choppers. Jules focused, then zoomed the tail-cam in on them. The women could see them close-up on the video-assist’s twelve-inch screen.
“Sandy,” Jules whispered, her hand over the mike, “Elias is in the deep shit now.”
“He’s got six AH-64E Apache helicopters on his ass,” Sandy said. “I wonder if he knows what he’s in for.”
* * *
Jules and Sandy did. A four-blade attack chopper with twin-turboshaft engines driving the rotor, nose-mounted target acquisition, and night vision systems, it had a 30mm M230 chain gun mounted beneath the main fuselage right between the landing gear. Capable of firing AGM-114 laser-guided Hellfire missiles and Hydra-70 rockets, the gunner could slave the chopper’s chain gun to his mounted helmet display so that when he stared at a target, the big gun automatically sighted in on it.
The two women had seen the U.S. deploy Apaches in over a dozen military theaters, including hundreds of firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’d witnessed the Israelis employ them against Hezbollah in 2006 in Lebanon and later against Hamas in Gaza, even using their Hellfire missiles to assassinate Hamas’s leaders, and then again in Syria against ISIS and Assad. They’d watched the Saudis flying them in Operation Scorched Earth, in which the choppers launched air strikes against Houthi rebels, driving them out of Saudi Arabia, then following and attacking the rebels in their home bases in Yemen. The Apaches flew air cover for the Egyptian government as well in its attempt to take the Sinai Peninsula back from armed extremists, and the women had been there, too.
Greece, Singapore, Japan, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Korea, Taiwan, the U.K.—the U.S. had sold that attack helicopter to a dozen countries, and Jules had seen them all over the world.
Yes, Elias was in for a whole world of pain.
* * *
But apparently no one told Elias about it. Sighting the Barrett in on the lead chopper, he sent a .50 caliber incendiary round streaking across the black sky.
More phosphorus rounds hit home, more, more, and the choppers too began exploding one at a time into massive blood-orange fireballs. The last survivor had gotten close enough to Jules and her sister that they felt its shock waves rock their chopper.
And then the Apaches were no more.
3
“I was told ‘no loose ends.’”
—Jamil Masoud
Jamil and his four men stood at the top of the hill overlooking the Edward Teller Nuclear Weapons Laboratory just outside of San Francisco.
Then he heard a beep on his cell and saw the text: Trojan horse has landed.
He clicked off the iPhone, with which he’d been transmitting the celebration to Hasad.
“Let’s do it,” he said to the men, ordering them down the hill. Putting on a pair of Locs Super Dark sunglasses with maximum UVB/UVA blockage, he and his men started down the far side of the green, sloping, tree-lined hill. Stopping long enough to raise the remote radio detonator just above the hill’s crest, Jamil pointed it toward the great Bear Flag Revolt cannon, in which he and the bomb maker had encased their Hiroshima-style nuke.
He pressed the red button.
Jamil thought he was physically and psychologically prepared to handle the explosion’s force, but the sheer inconceivable power of it caught him and his men by surprise. The outer reach of its blast wave knocked him and his men off their feet and sent them somersaulting down the hill.
When Jamil finally picked himself up, he saw he was all right. He’d positioned most of his body just below the summit. His men, however, had lingered too long atop the hill. With their Super Dark sunglasses, they’d hoped to catch a passing glance of the blast. The thermal pulse had burned their exposed arms and faces a painful crimson. The fireball was rising, its heat almost preternaturally intense. Still he had to look. He was pretty sure his sunglasses would allow him to sneak a peek, not at the thermal flash but at the fireball now floating over the hill.
He was wrong. Its brightness was blinding.
That close up, the explosion’s decibel volume was far beyond any human being’s auditory range. So the men walked to their parked black van in silence, zombielike, a dull stopped-up ringing in their ears. Jamil went to the passenger side to unlock the door and let them in.
Hesitating for a second, he said, “Just one thing.”
Instead of taking a key from his pocket, he removed a snub-nosed Ruger .44 mag—a Super Blackhawk—from his belt clip and shot all of them in rapid succession, the first one in the throat, the next in his right cheekbone near the nose, the third in the left eye, the fourth in the forehead.
“Sorry guys,” he said softly. “I was told ‘no loose ends.’”
Ordinarily, he wore earplugs when he fired the magnum. Not today. Thanks to the bomb, the gun’s loudness was not a problem.
A couple of hundred people in summer clothes, many badly burned, were racing across the street, fleeing the scene. All were deafened and/or blinded by the bomb, and all of them ignored or failed to notice the murders. No one seemed to care. “Caring” belonged to another life, another world. All anyone wanted now was to escape.
In the parking space in front of him was an ebony Jeep Wrangler all-terrain vehicle with a 3.6-liter engine, skid plates, a Garmin navigation system, blacked-out trim, heavy-duty bumpers, tow hooks, a winch, and a Torx tool kit for stripping off the roof, doors, and bumper cap ends. It could go almost five hundred miles on a single tank of gas.
Putting on the shades, he hazarded a quick sideways glance at the gray billowing mushroom floating high above the hill and the huge orange-crimson fireball rising under it. Even at a mile-and-a half away, the i
ncendiary sphere was blisteringly hot.
He slipped in behind the wheel and turned the ignition. Laying rubber, he peeled up the street toward the dense traffic. Cutting to his right, he passed the line of jammed cars, driving over sidewalks and lawns.
4
Like a planet-killing comet strike.
Low in the saddle, leaning over her handlebars, Elena was back on her Kawasaki Ninja H2, gunning it up Second Avenue. Sliding around a stalled car, she whipped wildly around a wrecked one, then jumped a curb to avoid an overturned bus.
She was tearing through the D.C. night with no street or window lights in sight. When the bomb went off, all the power for the street and building lights had gone out all at once, but that was no matter. Fires were erupting everywhere, illuminating D.C. like high noon in Death Valley.
Suddenly, a big red Cadillac Escalade swerved up onto the sidewalk in front of her, flattening a fire hydrant, flipping over, and cutting Elena off. An arcing blast of H20 geysered straight up a hundred feet in the air. Elena skidded to an abrupt stop. Behind her stood a wall of fire, over two hundred feet high, where the buildings surrounding the Capitol Building had once been, and spontaneous conflagrations were combusting all around her. The air must have been 150 degrees, and the D.C. fire department was going need every ounce of the water that hydrant could have supplied.
You can forget about that one, boys, Elena thought grimly.
Hot as it was, however, Elena didn’t take her leathers off. Gas mains under the street and gas jets in the buildings were exploding all over the place, their fiery blasts breaking up pavement and blowing out office windows. Flying chunks of concrete, masonry, and glass shards continually ripped her leathers and rang off her helmet. Many of the survivors, wandering and crawling around the sidewalk and street, looked to her as if they had been blown to pieces with buckshot.
Unable to negotiate the wreckage-strewn streets, Elena attempted to climb the curb and walk her bike up the sidewalk. Second Avenue’s sidewalks, however, were also impassable. Even now, the upturned Cadillac SUV blocked her. Walking her bike around the Caddie, she worked her way up the street for several more blocks. Shoving and dragging the Kawasaki around the smoking remains of burnt-out cars, past torn, bloodied, spread-eagled casualties, and over piles of masonry that had been blown out of the walls of shattered buildings, she was now dizzy and light-headed from hypoxia, the smoke-filled air nauseatingly unbreathable.
Stay focused. Get your ass out of here.
Like Lot’s wife, however, who could not refrain from looking back, Elena had to bear witness to the hellworld around her. The sidewalk and street were littered with hideously disfigured people, their bodies charred and bleeding, seared by thermal blast burns and machine-gunned by flying glass.
Fires were igniting everywhere, and she was choking on the smoke. The fireball that had consumed the Capitol Building had started to die and descend, but its mushroom cloud was still swelling and levitating, casting a black deathlike pall on those sections of the city unilluminated by fire.
She pushed her bike past a sobbing high-school-age girl in sandals, shorts, and what had been a tank top. She’d removed the shirt and thrown it away, but Elena still knew it had been a tank top. The burns on her body mimicked the lines of the shoulder straps. Elena knew darker shades absorbed heat more intensively than lighter colors. On this tank top’s front had been darkly emblazoned:
Washington Nationals
Black as charcoal, those letters were now seared into the girl’s breasts.
All around her thousands upon thousands of the walking dead stumbled blindly through the night, many having lost their vision to the initial flash. The horribly scorched held their arms above their agonizingly charred bodies to avoid touching their inflamed torsos. Radically dehydrated from their burns, they staggered up the sidewalks and streets, sobbing, “Water. Water. Water.”
And then she heard a tearing, groaning, deafening howl, as if some stupendously powerful Godzilla, gone mad with feral suffering, was bellowing an earsplitting, skull-exploding roar of primordial rage. She turned to face it and then saw that a soaring glass-and-steel tube, less than a hundred feet across and a thousand feet tall, was starting to go down. It was the Capitol Needle—the hotel she’d just visited—ripping loose from of its steel-rod and -plate moorings. Angling out over the city, it hung there for a seeming eternity, then began its torturous descent. Slowly, slowly, breaking free, it finally began to fall. Dropping, dropping, dropping, faster, faster, faster, it plummeted until its earth-cracking crash knocked Elena to her knees, smashing and devastating the world around her, shaking her to her soul, like a planet-killing comet strike.
Landing less than half a block from her, Elena saw and felt the whole thing.
This is Death City, kid. It’s like Hasad said: Get the fuck out of Dodge.
Pulling herself to her feet, she finally pushed her big Kawasaki off the sidewalk, swung on, and was once again back on H Street.
But now the congestion was starting to lighten up. This was the government district, and the area was packed with unlit government office buildings. Since it was dark, all the workers had gone home. The traffic and wrecked vehicles slowed her down, but it was far less crowded than it would have been had Hasad nuked the Capitol Building at noon. The farther she got from that area, the fewer cars she encountered.
Soon she was once again twisting crazily in and out of traffic at 90 mph, tires smoking and engine screaming like damned souls in hell. Next a screeching left onto Massachusetts Ave, then a savage skid around Columbus Circle. Cutting in and out of traffic at 95 mph, she hammered past that grand old granite edifice, Union Station.
No time for sightseeing, girl.
Skidding onto K Street NW, then First Street NW, then back onto K, she was westbound and down, tires shrieking around Washington Circle. Rocketing up K at 115 mph, slipping in and out of honking cars, she finally spotted her destination. Grinding the breaks frantically, she careened into 3000 K, the Washington Harbour, at a full slide.
Still she stayed on the bike, banging down the stone steps at 40 mph, bouncing on and off the seat like a drunken bull-buster fighting the clock for a hard, hot eight. Circling round the plaza’s big circular fountain, she washboarded up and down more steps, cutting through the open-air tables at Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place, onto the Potomac riverwalk, right up to the boat marina.
At which point she saw Jamie standing there on the walkway, waiting for her—just like he said he would—in pristine white pants, a white polo shirt, white boating shoes, a white New York Yankees baseball cap, and dark Armani sunglasses. He was drinking a bottle of Heineken and looking like he’d just stepped out of central casting for The Great Gatsby.
He was waiting for her in front of his 2006 MTI 40 Series offshore catamaran—the one with two Mercury 575 horsepower engines. It was the same boat Sonny Crockett had piloted to Cuba in the film Miami Vice. It could outrun anything on the sea.
Pandemonium reigned on the river walkway. Hundreds of people were milling and crowding about hysterically, begging boat owners for a ride.
“Ready?” Jamie asked.
“We are so fucking out of here,” Elena said.
Swinging off the bike, Elena let it fall where it stood. Following Jamie, she jumped onto the boat without looking back. Jamie was already seated and at the wheel. His four armed guards in jeans, T-shirts and wraparound shades and with MP9s slung under their sport coats stood guard in front of the catamaran. After Elena boarded, the guards cast them off, then headed for their own power launch.
Taking the seat next to him, Elena pulled an icy bottle of Heineken out of the red cooler on the deck beside her. A church key was in the cooler with it. Cracking it open, she took a long pull.
Jamie was already bouncing them up the Potomac toward the sea.
Flat out, pedal to the metal.
5
She wondered if he had made it.
—Jules Meredith
�
��Time to get the hell out of here,” Elias shouted into Jules’s and Sandy’s headsets.
Thick, dark, oily smoke was billowing out of the burnt-out choppers and the twisted remains of the armored personnel vehicles.
A dense white soot-filled smog engulfed the HRNPS. Fire, however, did illuminate some portions of the plant. At least four of the buildings—including the spent fuel warehouses—were ferociously aflame. The dry-cask spent-fuel silos—which were in the open and plainly visible—blazed fiercely, proving once and for all that dry casks were not as safe as the nuclear industry had so tenaciously and deceptively proclaimed.
“Any last words for our viewers?” Jules asked.
“Yeah,” Elias said, “head upwind, if you want to avoid radiation poisoning. The three of us have been lucky in that a hard wind’s been blowing off the Hudson River sweeping the shit south. We’re still breathing in some of it though.”
Sandy swung north, heading straight into the headwind.
“This is where the cowgirls ride away,” she yelled into her radio.
“Then I’ll see your souls in hell,” Elias shouted back, his mad laughter convulsing their headsets.
Somehow Sister Cassandra’s “Mission Apocalypse” continued to pound at their eardrums.
Where do we flee when the End’s at hand?
Where do we run when it’s our last stand?
Who has our back when the End times land?
When the mission’s apocalypse
The mission’s apocalypse
The mission’s apocalypse
Then came the bridge:
Oh, who has the deal when we’re too scared to cry?
How does it end? Will the whole world fry?
What do we do? Must everyone die?
When the mission’s apocalypse
The mission’s apocalypse
The mission’s apocalypse
When the mission’s apocalypse
The mission’s apocalypse
The mission’s apocalypse
All the while, Jules was duct taping the ventilation holes, door frames, and windshield edges—even as she and her sister gulped down iodine tablets.
And Into the Fire Page 29
